Insight: Transformation through AI

AI is the fastest growing deep technology in the world, with immense potential to reshape entire industries, drive substantial economic growth and transform various aspects of our lives, writes Bradley Ebsworth Willis - Associate Director of Continuous Improvement & Innovation. At Reed in Partnership, we acknowledge the transformative potential of AI and have developed a strategy to ensure we harness its power to help us to achieve our organisational mission of positively transforming the lives of people and their communities.

For all companies focused on service excellence and growth, investing in the right technology at the right time presents a significant challenge. The recent rise in the accessibility of AI as a viable technological choice for companies seeking to enhance their organisational capability poses both opportunities and risks. Our strategy involves venturing upon a bold digital transformation journey that reimagines our service delivery to enable us to continue to be a market leader in the provision of public services.

We started our journey by first identifying what won’t change. Our company is about people, and we’ve placed our people at the heart of our AI strategy. While the evolution of AI may change the way in which we work, we will use it to assist our teams to focus their time upon activities that add the most value to our customers and participants and empower the company to deliver impactful services. AI will not change the purpose or values of our company. It will empower us to improve what we already do very well – positively transform the lives of people and their communities.

AI has a multitude of potential different use cases, ranging from content generation to the ability to summarise and analyse vast datasets quicky and accurately. This wide-ranging capability can itself provide a challenge to project selection; however, it means that AI tools can have a positive and transformative impact upon all areas of the company.

To create a clear focus, we’ve placed four objectives at the heart of our AI strategy:

1. Transform the way we engage with our participants and how we support them to achieve their goals.
2. Support our teams to maximise the impact they have in their roles.
3. Improve the way we work together to achieve individual and organisational goals.
4. Create a responsive service delivery approach with an ambitious and focused innovation programme.

Like all successful innovation projects, actualising the full potential of AI relies upon following a robust innovation management methodology that ensures the delivery of optimal and impactful products. We start all development projects by investing quality time in understanding the ‘problem’ we are seeking to solve, identifying a clear use case and investing quality time in ideation. Executing this stage of a project well gives us the best opportunity to maximise value.

Appropriately assessing value comes next. Our value-add analysis will identify the prospective value of an innovation project, helping us to maximise value-add to our customers and participants, while minimising waste. Completing this analysis accurately ensures we select the right projects to take forward within a carefully managed innovation programme.

As part of any discovery work for a product that incorporates the use of AI, it’s imperative to look at the product through the lens of ethics and responsibility. We are committed to using AI in a responsible and ethnical manner. Our robust risk management framework will ensure that the right steps are taken to mitigate and manage any risks that come with AI utilisation relating to weakening ethics, bias and discrimination. Additionally, our continuous improvement and innovation strategy emphasises the significant value of co-creation with our customers and participants, which alongside our company values of being fair, open and honest, taking ownership and working together, results in an innovation approach that generates safe, responsible and customer-focused products.

In summary, the increased accessibility of AI will undoubtedly impact the way that we work. However, its full potential will only be realised through the successful execution of robust continuous improvement and innovation practices that ensure we’re solving the right problems at the right times for our customers.